Drowning Tucson (27 page)

When he finally made it to the median his mom put her arm on his shoulder and whispered I’m sorry. Peanut shrugged it off. His dad patted him on the back and asked if he was okay. You’re not too shook up are you? Peanut didn’t answer. Instead, he stood with his back to them and waited for the light to flash walk so he could just go home and get the hell away from those goddam cans crumpling beneath the cars driving by, still honking at him and screaming obscenities, the cans bouncing off of cars and beating up against the legs of Peanut and his family. Each one that hit him pierced like a cactus needle and made him wish he could jump in front of an oncoming car and feel his body break and scrape against the street as the car pulled him along and ground aluminum shards and asphalt into his body until he was an unrecognizable mass rolling into the gutter. The bottoms of his pants were soaked with the beer and soda that sprayed out of the cans each time a car smashed one.

Finally the light blinked walk and Peanut crossed the street, leaving his family behind him. Yolanda called for him to slow down, but he didn’t. He couldn’t be seen with them. We’re all miserable enough. And I know one of the fuckin Kings will catch wind of the whole thing and I’ll be the laughingstock of 24th Street. When he reached his street, he turned the corner and ran the rest of the way home.

Fifteen minutes later, he sat in the bathroom catching his breath, and waited to hear his family walk through the door, wishing he had a room of his own to lock himself in. But the front door didn’t open. He
waited to hear the unlatching of the handle and the creaking of the hinges, but eventually too much time had passed without a sound and he grew curious and walked out of the house, only to find his family tearing open their trashbags and throwing the cans all over the driveway. The sound made him cringe and he wanted to scream WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING? Do you want to bring every neighbor out of their house so they can stare at us and laugh and point their fingers at how pathetic we’ve become? Collecting cans like a family of immigrants. He opened his mouth to yell but was shocked to see his dad’s truck back up in the driveway and roll over the cans, spraying sticky liquid everywhere, and his family laughing. Laughing? Yes, they laughed and jumped around while his dad put the truck into drive and then into reverse and then back into drive, smashing the cans flat on the concrete until the driveway was covered with an aluminum mosaic.

Peanut was speechless. His brothers were running through the cans, kicking them up into the air and sliding on them and falling over, laughing. Yoli grabbed handfuls of the cans and threw them up like metal snowflakes, giggling when they clattered to the ground. And the whole time, his mother sat in the passenger seat of the truck cab with her hand over her mouth, attempting to smother her laughter because she knew she should say something stern about how dirty the children were getting and what a mess this whole thing was going to be.

Peanut thought fuck it, and he ran to the driveway and said Dad, you missed a couple, and kicked the cans into the path of the truck. The sound that had been driving him mad a few moments earlier had now become funny, and he laughed along with the rest of his family, knowing there was nothing he could do about how goddam broke they were. He was old enough to know that his father would never make them go collecting cans unless something bad had happened and they really needed money. He went to the garage and grabbed three shovels and handed them to his brothers and told them to help him shovel the flattened cans back into the trashbags.

While the three brothers filled the bags with crushed cans and tied the full bags and tossed them into the bed of the Ford, their father shut off the engine and got out, walking around the front of the truck to open
the door for his wife. Isabella put her hand out for her husband to help her into the yard because she was afraid of slipping on the liquid that was trickling down the driveway toward the street. All that filthy sticky junk sticking to the bottoms of her shoes.

As Peanut finished shoveling the last of the cans into his trashbag, a large brown roach appeared from a small hole in the ground—a hole a tenth the roach’s size—and fluttered its wings before scurrying toward the liquid covering the driveway. Peanut had to choke back vomit when hundreds more roaches suddenly began streaming from the hole, each one fluttering its translucent brown wings before dashing into the stream of soda and beer. Yoli saw the roaches and screamed and Freddie let go of his wife and rushed toward the truck, grabbing Yoli and waving the boys out of the way. He fired up the truck and drove back and forth over the driveway. The roaches crackled beneath the tires and their puss-filled bodies discharged all over the cement. Peanut felt bile burning its way up toward his mouth, eating at the lining of his esophagus and threatening to burst from between his lips. He covered his mouth with his hands and forced it back, looking up from the roaches being ground into the cement, and saw his little sister pressing her face against the window of the passenger door, her mouth wide in a scream, and then her eyes suddenly grew wider and she turned away from the window and disappeared onto the floorboard of the truck. Peanut slowly let his eyes drift down to the driveway. The roaches weren’t dying. Even though the driveway was covered with their puss, and the sound of their backs snapping filled the air, they continued to race around the driveway, licking at the slime of their own bodies mixed with the leftovers from the cans. Thousands more streamed out into the sunlight and the sludge until Freddie parked his truck atop the hole and yelled for Peanut to get the hose and spray the fuckers out into the street. Peanut ran to the side of the house and ordered Gordo to turn the hose on. Water came out of the hose and Peanut placed his thumb over the nozzle and formed a powerful spray that blew the roaches and the slime and the one or two cans they had missed out into the street where the sun would bake the mixture into a paste.

Freddie shouted THERE MUST BE MILLIONS OF THE BASTARDS LIVING BENEATH THE GROUND RIGHT UNDER OUR HOUSE. JESUS. Peanut threw the bags of cans into the bed of the truck and ran to the shed to get the gas his father kept in a milk jug for cleaning his hands. The gas slopped inside the jug and Peanut removed the cap and told his dad to back up the truck. Back it up and give me some room so I can kill these fuckers—nauseated by the thought of ten million roaches burrowing beneath the house and bursting through the floor like a geyser, overrunning the house and eating the flesh off his baby sister as she slept on the floor of their living room. When his dad had backed the truck down the driveway, Peanut poured the gas into the hole, watching as the roaches retreated and the gas bubbled from the jug and spread over the driveway, mingling with the muck. He grabbed a lighter and his pack of cigarettes from his front pants pocket and lit one, then flicked it toward the hole. The fumes erupted into flames, and Peanut’s family watched as the roaches scrambled out of the hole and onto the driveway with their backs on fire and their legs melting beneath them even as they tried to run from the heat. Eventually they stopped running and the crackling of burning roaches filled in the silence left by Peanut and his family.

Shaken, Peanut’s mother told the boys to pile into the truck, and Yoli, stay in the front with me and Daddy. The boys hopped into the truckbed, careful to avoid the bags of filthy metal. They drove to Safeway, ignoring the cans still scattered all over 22nd. Since it was Saturday and Safeway was crowded, Isabella told them to wait in the truck. She grabbed a shopping cart and pushed it alongside the truck so Peanut could hoist the bags over and into the cart. He was happy to be rid of the damn things. When his parents disappeared into the store, he ordered his brothers to watch Yoli, I’ll be right back. Slipping between the rows of cars, Peanut lit a cigarette and his thoughts returned to saving his sister. He tried to think of any girls in the neighborhood who hadn’t become used-up whores by the time they reached eighteen, but the only ones he could bring to mind were the nasty skanks from school who wouldn’t lose their virginity until they went off to college and got broken in by someone too pathetic to care about her looks. And even these girls were sad. They knew that the only thing that mattered was
whether or not they were fuck material. If you aren’t fuckable, you might as well stop wasting air.

But he knew his sister was going to be pretty, unless some terrible accident occurred. Of course, there was nothing he could do about that, so he tried to think of loopholes in the system. Surely there was a really hot chick at his school that no one had gotten his hands on. There must be. The last time he could remember fantasizing about a chick and not actually managing to bag her was back in the sixth grade, before he’d railed anyone. But as soon as he started running with the Kings, as soon as he’d gotten his crown tattoo, there had been so many women he never had to chase any. They came to him. Maybe he could tempt one of the lesser Kings into doing something to his sister one day and then kill the poor bastard and make an example of him. Except killing another King would mean he’d have to die too. Goddam, he thought, this is way harder than I thought it would be.

He walked back to the truck and hopped into the back just as his parents emerged from the store with a bag of food. Yoli jumped up and down in the front seat and waved at her parents crossing the parking lot toward the truck. When they reached it, Yoli shouted WHO GETS THE PRIZE, MOMMY? HUH? WHO GETS THE PRIZE? Her brothers knew she would get it. She was the youngest. Besides, they knew from the look on their mother’s face and the bag of food she carried that the can collecting had been no game. So they sat down in the back of the truck and waited for their father to start it and drive away, hoping they wouldn’t get caught at a stoplight and have to stare awkwardly at the people in the cars behind them. Isabella fished a tiny package of saladitos out of the paper grocery sack on her lap and handed them to her daughter. Do I get a lemon too, Mommy? Isabella shook her head no. Her husband pumped the gas pedal, put the truck into gear, and headed back home.

Peanut woke to the smell of his father’s workboot, but the actual shoe wasn’t there. It must’ve been part of a dream. Or just habit. He looked up at the clock and saw it was past one thirty in the morning, then he sat up and looked over at Yoli sleeping peacefully on her side next to Gordo. He knew he was onto something earlier, when he decided he
would simply have to get her out of this place. Maybe to another city or something. That’s it. She wants to go to Disneyland, so I’ll just take her away to where Disneyland is, somewhere over in California. I know I’ll be able to find it. Just drive west and ask around. He knew it was a great idea, even if it was kind of complicated. So he quietly stood up and tiptoed to the hall closet, where they kept most of the kids’ clothes. He opened the door slowly, inch by inch, to avoid making the door creak and waking his parents. The clothes hung on hangers and were separated into neatly folded piles on the floor. First he found himself a pair of Dickies and a hooded sweatshirt, and then he rifled through Yoli’s pile, taking care not to disturb Gordo’s or Carlos’s. When he had found a nice warm outfit for his sister, he put his clothes on and sneaked through the kitchen and out the back door of the house, happy for once that, unlike so many other families in the area, his family couldn’t afford a wrought-iron screen door, because it surely would’ve creaked badly and woken the whole damn house.

Outside, Peanut walked to his father’s truck and opened the door, throwing Yoli’s clothes onto the seat next to him. He pumped the gas and placed the keys in the ignition. Realizing he would definitely get caught if he fired up the truck in the driveway, Peanut forced the gear shift on the steering wheel down into neutral, letting the truck roll quietly down the driveway and into the street. The truck continued to roll once it reached the street and Peanut wrestled the steering wheel—no fuckin power steering, of course—and turned the truck onto the road, its momentum allowing it to roll a few houses down the block before it stopped rolling, and Peanut was able to safely start the truck without having to worry about waking anyone. The truck started right up, and Peanut put it in park, with the lights off, allowing it to idle while he went to get his sister.

He crept back into the house through the back and wrapped Yoli’s blanket tight around her, shushing her when she woke and opened her mouth to ask him what he was doing. Shhhhh. Just be quiet for a minute. I’ve got a surprise for you outside, and Yoli’s eyes opened wide with excitement, but she only nodded to show her approval and to assure her brother that she wouldn’t make a sound. He held her tight to his chest and stood
up, looking at his brothers and wondering when he’d see them again, if ever. It made him want to bundle up his whole family and place them in the back of the idling truck and sneak them off to someplace where Dad wouldn’t lose his job, and Mom wouldn’t have to work as a cashier when she’d probably rather be at home cooking or planting a garden or something. Maybe she’d rather be in the PTA or volunteer as a class mom at Yoli’s school. He wanted to bundle them all up and tell them, here, leave the driving to me, you just relax back there and soon we’ll be out of this desert and we’ll all be happy and find a house with four bedrooms and a staircase and a basement, and a swimming pool—that way we don’t have to pay fifty cents each to go swimming in the piss-filled pool at Jacob’s Park. We’ll have our own and we can invite our friends and Yoli won’t ever have to grow up to be somebody’s bitch. She’ll go to dances and fall in love and marry someone nice who hasn’t dealt drugs his whole life or killed people. But Peanut knew this was impossible. He had only planned for him and Yoli, and so he turned his back on his sleeping brothers, holding Yoli against his chest, and crept from the house one last time.